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Inside Bush’s Bunker

For any second-term president—as the pressure grows to cement his legacy, and with many of his best aides gone—the physical bunker of an electronically sealed, sniper-patrolled White House, which restricts his access to old friends and new ideas, can lead to psychological isolation. Talking to administration insiders, the author learns why George W. Bush’s disconnect is even more extreme, from the “Churchillian riff” he goes into when Iraq is discussed, to his eerie optimism, to his increasing reliance on a dwindling band of diehards.

Sometime early on the morning of January 20, 2009, if recent history is a reliable guide, George W. Bush will sit down at the carved oak desk in the Oval Office and compose a note wishing his successor Godspeed. The desk is made from timbers of H.M.S. Resolute, a British bark that was abandoned to the ice but later salvaged by an American whaling vessel and presented to Queen Victoria in 1856 as a token of friendship. When the ship was finally decommissioned, the Queen sent a desk made from its best wood to President Rutherford B. Hayes. Since then almost every president has used the desk in one way or another. John F. Kennedy Jr. played behind the hinged door in its front, which Franklin D. Roosevelt installed to hide his leg braces and wheelchair.

Bunkers, by their nature, reinforce the tics, the traits, the tendencies of their occupants. Illustration by Edward Sorel. In the last winter light of his tenure, what could this president, the captain of a ship that even many of his once loyal crew think of as the U.S.S. Delusional, possibly have to say to the man or woman who takes his place? Ronald Reagan left the first President Bush a note with the exhortation “Don’t let the turkeys get you down!” The elder Bush left Bill Clinton a note promising that he would be “rooting” for him.

Clinton has never revealed what he wrote to the second President Bush, but it seems safe to say that, in 2001, neither of them could have envisioned just what a failed presidency the 43rd president’s would turn out to be, dragged down by war, incompetence, and corruption. The man buried in Grant’s tomb may soon move up a rung. In those moments when Bush’s aides seek to show that their president is more conscientious, more reflective—in a word, deeper—than he tends to appear, they release samples of his thinking, in his own hand. (“Let freedom reign!” was his jotted response to word from Condoleezza Rice that the United States had returned sovereignty to the first of several ineffectual governments in Iraq.) But far from demonstrating Bush’s depth, such exercises seem only to prove that the president, like the rest of us, has an opposable thumb. If he keeps a diary of his innermost thoughts, as even Ronald Reagan did, no one has seen it. If Bush harbors doubts about the wisdom of his course, he has not been known to confide them—he is in fact famous for being unable to admit, or even to remember, a mistake. Does he have regrets? Too few to mention: he’s done it his way.

By its nature, the presidency is a lonely job. Through personality, predilection, and sheer force of will, Bush has made his presidency far lonelier than most. According to Bob Woodward, Bush told a group of Republican lawmakers in late 2005 that he would not withdraw from Iraq even if his wife, Laura, and his dog, Barney, were the only ones still supporting him. He seems determined, these days, to prove the point. Now, with not quite a year and a half left before Bush leaves office, we have already arrived at the beleaguered endgame of his presidency. From deep inside the fortified precincts of the White House, the president projects a preternatural calm. He gives orders to nonexistent armies, which his remaining lieutenants gamely transmit: “Reform immigration!” “Overhaul the tax code!” “Privatize Social Security!” Outside the bunker, in the country that his administration now refers to as “the homeland,” there is chaos and confusion.

The Democrats bridged the Potomac after winning the elections last fall, and the Blue Army has now overrun most of political Washington. Its flag flies above the Capitol. More and more of the president’s subordinates have been captured and interrogated, most notably the attorney general, Alberto Gonzales. Others, such as Matthew Dowd, the president’s former chief campaign strategist, have managed to make good their escape—Dowd by parachuting onto the front page of the enemy New York Times with a detailed denunciation of Bush’s policies. Independent powers that would sue for peace—the Baker-Hamilton Commission, for example—have been banished. Some loyalists, including presidential counselor Dan Bartlett, have simply fled to the safety of the private sector. For one reason or another, most of the commander in chief’s senior advisers are now gone, replaced by callow upstarts and last-chance opportunists. The two most powerful advisers have been the president’s second-in-command and his propaganda minister—his vice president and his political strategist—who had been at his side from the beginning and have remained close and trusted, despite the catastrophes they helped to engineer. Dick Cheney will haunt the bunker till the end, but the political strategist, Karl Rove, has quietly slipped away. The leader himself—with his lady and his loyal dog—soldiers on, in an atmosphere of disconnection and illusion. Lurid tabloid tales may hint at binge drinking and marital estrangement, although visitors report uniformly, and much to their surprise, that the president seems optimistic, unbowed, chipper, his gaze bright and steadfast. The tide is about to turn! We will prevail! But it is a hermetic and solitary existence.

In the first six months of this year, the president dined outside the White House for purely personal social reasons on precisely three evenings, all in the same small swath of Northwest Washington, in the homes of old friends and aides. So it’s easy enough to imagine that Bush’s frame of mind, on the morning of his successor’s inauguration, will be one of isolation. As the clock winds down, with his fate inescapable, he may wander one last time through the sprawling White House complex, with its bulletproof-glass windows, its bombproof bunker, its tamperproof water supply. His whereabouts will be tracked on a small computer monitor, known as the Locator Box, in the office of his chief of staff. When he leaves the Oval Office to greet the new president in the White House residence, walking along the outdoor colonnade that leads from the West Wing, he will pass a small, lacquered wooden sign on a stand. It serves as a warning to anyone who seeks to enter his locked-down mind, or the closed world in which he lives. In gilt lettering the sign reads, no tours beyond this point. A Hell of a Place It isn’t just a metaphor, this image of the president in a bunker.

It is the fate of every president to some degree—and of this one more than any since Richard Nixon in his last days. Many factors combine to create a bunker psychology. The first, common to all modern presidencies, is the physical structure of the White House itself: appearances to the contrary, it literally is a bunker, and like any building it shapes its occupants. Another factor, again common to all presidencies, is the relentless working of time—particularly in a second term—as the buildup of problems and the departure of trusted aides create an atmosphere of vulnerability and suspicion. A third factor is the character of the man in the Oval Office. Some, like Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and Bill Clinton, were temperamentally incapable of long-term bunker life. For others, like Nixon, the bunker was in some strange way the ecological niche they were born to fill.

What about the current occupant? Over the past few months, I have spoken with dozens of current and former White House officials about George W. Bush and his presidency; for obvious reasons, most of them requested anonymity. They paint a picture of a president whose physical circumstances reinforce his psychological ones, and whose “My Way or the Highway” personality ultimately means that he travels alone. Let’s begin with the White House itself. A central truth about the presidential complex, easy to overlook, is that it is above all a military installation—a bristling fortress with a single first-class compartment at its heart. The president occupies a bunker from the moment he takes office. He must fight strenuously to escape it, and the tendency of the bunker is always to pull him back. Harry Truman, to whom Bush has lately taken to comparing himself, referred to the president’s mansion on one occasion as a “great white sepulcher.” On another he called it “a hell of a place to be alone.” But Truman usually wasn’t alone there. He rose regularly from his sepulcher and made a point of breaking out of his private hell. Doing so has gotten harder. The street approach to the White House complex is cordoned off for a block in every direction, defended by rows of heavy iron bollards and retractable metal barriers implanted in the roadway.

The core 18-acre White House zone is sealed by a high iron fence and a dense network of electronic sensors and alarms. Snipers patrol the White House roof. Anti-aircraft systems crown the neighboring buildings. A military presence is everywhere. Whenever the president is at work in the Oval Office, a brace of Marine guards in full-dress uniform stand at fixed posts under the West Wing portico; when he leaves, they retreat to a holding area. The largest single component of the White House operation, in terms of personnel and budget, is also the least known: the White House Military Office. Even before the 9/11 attacks, the Military Office accounted for 2,200 of the 5,900 workers on the extended White House staff. The Military Office oversees food service in the West Wing mess and on Air Force One, for which it sends out anonymous shoppers to local grocery stores. It provides the staff of mostly Filipino stewards who function as the president’s valets. The Military Office oversees the White House Communications Agency, once a branch of the Army Signal Corps, and it coordinates all presidential transportation.

Every motorcade contains a wagonload of black-clad, heavily armed Secret Service agents, known as the cat (for “counter-assault team”), and two identical, armored black Cadillac limousines. One of them carries the president; the other is a decoy that carries the president’s doctor and his personal aide and is known as “the toast car” (as in what it would be if the worst ever happened). This is the part of the military infrastructure that the public sometimes sees. But down a stairwell in the East Wing, near the family movie theater and the visitors’ office, and past the elaborate water-filtration system that purifies every drop flowing toward White House taps and tubs, is a parallel universe that no outsider so much as glimpsed until a few years ago, when several photographs were released of Vice President Dick Cheney at work there right after the World Trade Center fell. This is the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, or peoc—the president’s secure, bombproof underground redoubt. The atmosphere is kept sanitized by air locks and an independent ventilation system. Generators are on standby to provide backup electricity. Emergency escape routes lead underground from the bunker to points unknown. Besides meeting rooms, there are spartan, dormitory-style accommodations for the president, his top aides, and his family. It is here that the president’s on-duty military aide—the officer who carries the “football,” the briefcase containing authorization codes for launching nuclear weapons—sleeps during his 24-hour shift.

The effect on the mind of all this security—built up a brick at a time from the Cold War through the Kennedy assassination to the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life and the rise of global terrorism—cannot be overstated. “It doesn’t set out to be so isolating,” one former presidential aide told me. “But when you’re protected by a secure package, and all these instruments and institutions and functions grow up around you, it’s kind of inevitable.” On his way to work, Bill Clinton, according to one of his former personal assistants, would occasionally drop by the tourist line downstairs, just for a brief infusion of the outside world—something no longer allowed the president in a post-9/11 environment. The physical isolation of the president, any president, in the White House is extreme—palpable and oppressive even on the happiest day, in the most successful administration, during the best of times. The psychological isolation weighs more heavily still, and never more so than when a president is on the ropes.

Matthew Dowd told me that he now hardly recognizes the once gregarious politician he first came to know in Texas, when Bush was governor. He said he is not sure how much of the change in the current White House atmosphere can be ascribed to Bush’s personality and how much to the restrictive nature of the place, but he says, “Ultimately it rests with the president.” “It’s not only the White House, and how a White House operates,” Dowd adds, “but I think when you get beleaguered and you feel like you’re under fire, then everybody who’s not agreeing with you, or not on the program, is part of the problem.” The entire White House machine is designed to preserve, protect, and defend a president’s distance from friends and enemies alike. Just knowing that plainclothes guards lurk everywhere, even if unseen and sworn to secrecy, is guaranteed to disturb the coolest head in unpredictable ways. (One of the Kennedy family’s favorite Broadway songs was the First Daughter’s plaintive lament from Irving Berlin’s Mr. President, “The Secret Service Makes Me Nervous.”) Until Bill Clinton demanded a change, in 1993, the president’s telephones did not even have direct-dial buttons to make outside calls. All calls to and from the president had to be routed to the switchboard, and through a communications-staff person with a designation out of a Cold War novel: Operator 1.

Only a few of the president’s closest friends and family members know the direct-dial numbers that will reach his office or the residence, and only a few know the private Zip Code that, in theory, makes it possible for mail to reach the president directly (though even then it must first be subjected to tests for anthrax and who knows what other threats). The current president himself pointed out, on taking office, that he would have to give up the pleasure of e-mailing with family and friends, because their idlest musings would become presidential documents, subject to scrutiny and review. (Some of Bush’s closest aides, including Karl Rove, did an end run around that problem by conducting White House business on Republican National Committee e-mail accounts, which are not subject to the same recordkeeping requirements.)

Imagine, for a moment, that one of George W. Bush’s oldest friends—say, his Yale classmate Roland Betts—wants to reach him. How does he go about it? Here is roughly what might happen: Betts’s name is on a short list of known presidential friends. Betts may even know the direct number of the Oval Office suite, where he might get the president’s personal secretary, or the director of Oval Office operations, on the phone. She in turn might ask the advice of the president’s personal aide, known in Clinton White House parlance as “the butt boy.” If the president is not doing anything in particular, and the two aides agree that he might like to talk to his old friend, the call might be put through. Or they might take a number and arrange a callback, perhaps from the president’s limousine on his way to a public appearance.

Getting in touch is almost never a one-step process. Now imagine that the mayor of a big American city—New Orleans, for instance—is trying to reach the president. Let’s say the mayor is upset and, in a break with protocol, somehow manages to be connected to the Oval Office suite. What would happen next? First, his call would be routed to the office of Intergovernmental Affairs, the unit in the West Wing that handles presidential relations with states and municipalities. With luck, the mayor may actually know someone in that office. Maybe he blows his top and talks his way into being connected with one of the deputy chiefs of staff. Maybe, eventually, he makes it to the chief of staff himself (after asking a friendly senator or G.O.P. fat cat to intercede). And maybe then, just maybe, the chief of staff calls the president’s office. (The chief of staff is one of the tiny handful of people whose calls are always put through.) And maybe, if all goes well, the chief of staff suggests that the president call the mayor back. And if all continues to go well, after two or three missed attempts they connect, and the president says he’ll see what he can do about whatever it is the mayor wants. And then the process starts all over again. For the president—any president—to receive reliable, unvarnished, outside information about what’s really going on in the world can require an enormous personal effort.

Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush sent out handwritten notes by the thousands to keep lines open to friends and acquaintances, and to remind themselves of the utter vastness of life outside. Bill Clinton made it his business to telephone old pals and fellow pols, often late at night, to test his assumptions, ask for advice, get a reality check. He brought his friend the historian Taylor Branch to the White House for freewheeling conversations on nearly 80 occasions. Clinton also read voraciously, including his own press clippings, which sometimes enraged him. Ronald Reagan’s newly released diaries suggest that he watched Meet the Press and 60 Minutes more faithfully each Sunday than he went to church; more than once, while watching Jerry Lewis’s annual Labor Day telethon for muscular dystrophy, he picked up the phone, asked to be connected to the number on the screen, and had trouble persuading stunned operators that it was indeed the president trying to make a pledge. Bush’s aides maintain that he keeps up with a network of friends around the country, and often frustrates White House operators by picking up the phone to dial directly. But Bush has never made a public point of demonstrating that he cares about openness or is determined to stay in touch.

To the contrary, even in small, symbolic ways he has erected barriers. The Bush administration appears to be the first in history to have posted a formal dress code for anyone wanting to set foot in the West Wing: no jeans, sneakers, shorts, miniskirts, T-shirts, tank tops, or flip-flops. More seriously, the administration has placed strict new limits on access to presidential papers, including its own. The president himself, meanwhile, has famously insisted that he ignores most newspapers and television news programs, preferring to get his information from the White House’s own “objective sources,” meaning the people around him. Bush also insists that he ignores polls, which Dowd, his former pollster, says is a grave mistake. “How do you, when you’re sitting in a very tight, circled place, where you go from a black limousine to a helicopter to a big airplane—how do you keep in touch with what people think? One of the ways to tell what people think is, basically, by polls. For all that we can fault Clinton—and I never voted for the guy—at least he had a sense, and one of his barometers was where the American people were.”

It’s hard to imagine that Bush doesn’t at least glance at the carefully collated daily White House news summary, a digest of the day’s top stories and editorial comment stapled together in a fat, legal-size pile. At a minimum, he reads enough of it to have recommended last July that his staff check out an upbeat assessment of the Iraq war in The Washington Post’s Outlook section written by William Kristol, one of the war’s intellectual cheerleaders. This, to be sure, is the kind of news that Bush wants to hear. When the news is something else, he may simply choose not to hear it. According to the reporter Ron Suskind, in August of 2001 a C.I.A. analyst was sent to the Bush ranch, in Texas, to brief the president about indications of an imminent threat from al-Qaeda. The president heard him out and then sent him packing with the words “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”

The Bush White House has its own cable-television system, with a custom lineup of channels (Homeland Box Office, it might be called). When he travels out of town, Vice President Cheney demands, according to written instructions that recently became public, that the television sets in his hotel suite be turned on to the right-wing Fox News before he arrives. The TVs in the Bush presidential orbit are so routinely fixed on Fox that when the president gave Nancy Reagan the use of his official 747 for her husband’s funeral, three years ago, she had to ask the stewards to change the channel, noting pointedly that her son Ron was affiliated with MSNBC. During the 2004 re-election campaign, presidential advance teams expelled from public events anyone they suspected might not quietly toe the party line. Since then, Bush has rarely appeared before any group, big or small, whose loyalties and questions were not pre-screened and pre-approved. In the course of a Bush trip to Rhode Island in June, Jarrod Holbrook, a correspondent for WPRI-TV, in Providence, twice dared to call out “Mr. President!” at an airport photo op where no one had told him that questions were off limits. Holbrook, a former Marine originally from Texas, told me he had merely intended to ask how Bush was enjoying his first visit to Rhode Island as president. A member of the White House entourage with an earpiece and security pin immediately yanked Holbrook’s press credential off his belt, and disappeared with it into Air Force One.

In the end, insularity becomes inertial, feeding on itself to create ever more isolation. The Great Desertion The isolating nature of the White House is at its most extreme in a second term. Of all the presidents lucky enough, or cursed enough, to win a second term, probably none would claim that the second time around was better. Sometimes the falloff has been pronounced. Woodrow Wilson won re-election in 1916 on the platform that “he kept us out of war,” but the United States entered World War I anyway, and Wilson left office humiliated by the failure of America to join the League of Nations and brutally crippled by a stroke. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first-term achievement in ending the Korean War and presiding over a booming consumer economy faded in anxiety about Sputnik abroad, civil rights at home, and his own multiplying medical problems.

Richard Nixon’s travails with Watergate speak for themselves, as do Ronald Reagan’s with the Iran-contra scandal and Bill Clinton’s with the Lewinsky affair and impeachment. By any measure, the failure of George Bush’s second term has been spectacular. Winning re-election in 2004, he bragged in a post-victory news conference that he had accumulated a surpassing quantity of political capital and now intended to spend it. The political capital has been squandered. Bush’s grand plan to overhaul Social Security by creating private investment accounts never got off the ground. His effort to reform immigration law resulted in bitter denunciations by conservatives in his own party and a humiliating defeat in Congress. His pathetic response to Hurricane Katrina exploded any claim he might make, as the first president in history with a business degree, to managerial competence.

Ever since the Democrats took control of Congress in the midterm elections, the administration has faced slow death by subpoena on a dozen fronts. Hanging over everything has been the debacle of Iraq, a failure acknowledged everywhere in Washington except the Oval Office. The recognition of failure is so pervasive that when the president went looking for a new “czar” to oversee the war effort, he ended up with a man, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, who had actually opposed the president’s policy of “surging” more American troops into Baghdad. The paradox of second terms—of second terms in general, and of this one most acutely—is that just when a president most needs an A Team of trusted, experienced aides around him, willing to puncture wishful thinking, he is all too apt to be surrounded by an F Troop of third- and fourth-tier appointees who have been brought in as neophytes or who had simply hung around long enough to move up the ladder. Bush’s first White House domestic-policy adviser was the capable Margaret Spellings.

That job was later given to Claude Allen, who resigned in the shadow of criminal charges involving a department-store refund scam, and it is now held by Karl Zinsmeister, a stern but erratic ideologue imported from the world of right-wing think tanks. If Bush’s first-term surgeon general, Dr. Richard Carmona, did not inspire confidence with his recent admission that administration officials muzzled him on hot-button issues like the morning-after pill, then what is the country to make of Bush’s current nominee for the job, Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr., who helped found a church that ministers to people who no longer wish to be gay or lesbian? How about Michael Baroody, a senior lobbyist at the National Association of Manufacturers, who was forced to withdraw as Bush’s nominee to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission last spring after it came out that the association was preparing to give him a $150,000 send-off payment? (As C.P.S.C. director, he would be regulating products made by its members.) Or Henrietta Holsman Fore, nominated by Bush to replace Randall Tobias, deputy secretary of state for foreign assistance, after Tobias was forced to resign in an escort scandal? It turned out that Fore once told a college audience that she had tried to retain black employees when she was president of a small wire-products company near Los Angeles but that they preferred selling drugs; that Hispanics were lazy; and that Asians, while productive, favored professional or management jobs. (Her nomination is pending in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.) You can multiply such examples by several score. These may not be officials at the apex of power, but the functioning of any presidency depends on people at this level, and the steady degradation of their ranks is corrosive.

The desertions from Bush’s innermost circle have been, if anything, more pronounced. By the end of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s tenure in the White House, some loyalists lamented that the aides most able to save him from trouble, or at least from himself—people such as his political adviser, Louis Howe; his secretary, Missy LeHand; and his all-purpose confidant, Harry Hopkins—were all gone from the scene. The same is true for Bush: absent now are most of the aides who knew him best, served him longest, and could give it to him straightest—people such as his old friend and former commerce secretary, Don Evans; his counselor Karen Hughes; and his longest-serving aide, Dan Bartlett. Unlike his father, who had in men such as James Baker and Brent Scowcroft genuine peers whose unvarnished advice he trusted totally, George W. Bush has never had advisers whom he regarded as true equals, so the loss of those few who came close is a calamity. By all accounts Bush’s chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, who took the job last year and freshened up the White House operation with a new press secretary and other changes, is a skilled Washington player, unafraid to give Bush bad news or challenge prevailing thinking. But, as a range of Republican insiders told me, Bolten was no match for Karl Rove. Variously nicknamed “Boy Genius” and “Turd Blossom” by Bush, Rove remained the president’s chief political strategist and the dominant internal White House force (read: schoolyard bully), despite having had his wings clipped and his policy portfolio lightened by Bolten—and despite having seen his hopes for a permanent Republican majority repudiated last fall. Rove was able to interpret Bush’s moods and thinking better than anyone, which gave him extraordinary power. But his effectiveness was ultimately diminished by the cloud of controversy that surrounded him, and one White House veteran told me that Republican candidates around the country had begun to shun his advice. To the surprise of many, Rove announced his resignation in August, his voice cracking in an emotional news conference with Bush.

The blossom may be off the turd, but the bunker Rove helped Bush build remains very much in place. Karen Hughes, one of the most prominent among the former Bush aides, and well known for being an effective counterforce to Rove’s partisan machismo, was the first to leave the White House inner circle (in 2002, to spend more time with her family), though she remained plugged in enough to be the one to tell Bush that, whatever he thought, he did look defensive and impatient in his first 2004 debate against John Kerry. Matthew Dowd not only left the fold but went above it: in a front-page interview with The New York Times last spring, Dowd detailed chapter and verse of his disappointment with the president’s policies. Nicolle Devenish Wallace, a canny, candid communications aide who once worked for Jeb Bush, was a mainstay of the re-election campaign and actually seemed to enjoy the company of journalists; she left the White House last year out of frustration with Rove’s iron rule, his refusal to brook criticism, and his tendency to mock and humiliate anybody who disagreed with him. Even more striking was the departure of counselor Dan Bartlett, the man sometimes described as the son Bush never had. Though Bartlett, who had worked for Bush since 1993, always kept a discreet and loyally low profile, he was understood to have been willing to tell the president unpleasant truths. It was Bartlett who assembled a compilation reel of post-Katrina news coverage in a last-ditch effort to make Bush understand what everyone else in America knew: that the president had a crisis on his hands. Bartlett announced his resignation in June, on his 36th birthday, looking at least half again that age, and told reporters that the birth of his third son, in January, meant it was past time for a change. Bush issued a statement praising Bartlett as a “true counselor.” But there was, all the same, something grudging in Bush’s body language and a poignant trace of abandonment in Bartlett’s departure, which came a full year after Bolten had asked senior aides either to leave immediately or pledge to stay the remainder of Bush’s term.

So most of the grown-ups are gone. In the end, Bush is left tethered to the most bunkered subordinate of all, Dick Cheney, who, according to The Washington Post, squirrels away even the most routine office documents in “man-sized Mosler safes” and who reaches down into the tiniest capillaries of the federal bureaucracy to assert his will. Bush and Cheney have always presented Cheney’s lack of presidential ambition as an asset, one that has allowed Cheney to serve the president with unquestioned loyalty and singular effectiveness. The truth is precisely the opposite. As the 2008 election approaches, it is obvious that Cheney’s willful political tone-deafness has become one of Bush’s biggest liabilities. A vice president with his eye on the prize would operate with more astuteness and delicacy, if only for the sake of his own objectives. And a president determined to ensure his vice president’s prospects could never afford to be as stubborn, as seemingly oblivious to the physics of electoral reality, as Bush has chosen to be.

Despite reports of supposedly diminished influence, and of occasional losses to Defense and State on policy questions, Cheney remains the most powerful vice president in history—all the more powerful for the total privacy of his relationship with the president. One Bush-administration veteran had this to say by way of summary: “The guy scares the crap out of me.” Deluder in Chief At a formal White House dinner last spring, President Bush made friendly small talk about one of the White House’s latest technological marvels: the secure digital video-conferencing system, through which Bush can consult with far-flung aides or with world leaders such as Iraqi prime minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki at any hour of the day or night. The picture and sound quality are so lifelike, Bush told those around him, “I can see Maliki quake when I chew him out!” The reality of Bush’s isolation in the bunker is that the reverse happens to him only rarely.

Communication is a one-way street; Bush himself never gets a talking-to. “When people go in to see him now to discuss Iraq,” a longtime Washington Republican who served both Ford and Reagan told me, “he has this kind of Churchillian riff that he goes into. But he doesn’t really talk about it. He will receive people. But that doesn’t mean he hears people.” When he was Ronald Reagan’s White House political director, Ed Rollins used to arrange occasional, informal focus groups with ordinary people—truckdrivers, nurses—whose anecdotal histories were Reagan’s lifeblood. Rollins sees no equivalent effort in Bush’s White House. In fact, he told me, he has heard from well-known people who were brought to the White House to present their views on policy questions and instead got a piece of Bush’s mind. One businessman from New York was asked to the White House to offer his views on stem-cell research—”a major C.E.O., a hospital board chairman,” Rollins recalls. The man told Rollins that, after he spoke up, Bush “put his finger in my chest” in angry disagreement. One longtime former Republican official, who held senior posts in both the first and second Bush administrations, was bluntest of all. “My question is,” this former official told me, “does he expose himself to people who respectfully disagree, or thoughtfully disagree, or may have a legitimate suggestion? Not a lot, no. I think some of us are just born with a really, really active curiosity. If you’re on a farm, you ask, How does this irrigation system work?’ I think he has a very narrow curiosity. He’s polite. He was raised to be polite. But you just never sense a deep curiosity. His interests are exercise and chopping wood.”

At the height of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln sought convivial company wherever he could find it. A couple of nights a week he might head to the home of his sophisticated secretary of state, William H. Seward, for talk, companionship, a change of scene. As noted, in the first six months of this year, excluding the obligatory press dinners (which he only suffers) and foreign-summit dinners (ditto), Bush left the White House to socialize only three times. According to the CBS correspondent Mark Knoller, who keeps a fastidious record of such things, Bush went out for an early Sunday-night dinner in March at the home of Karl Rove; in June, he dined at the homes of Clay Johnson, an old Yale friend who is now the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, and of James Langdon Jr., a lawyer and major Bush fund-raiser who headed the president’s foreign-intelligence advisory board. In all three instances Bush was back at the White House by around his usual bedtime of 9:30 p.m.

By comparison, Laura Bush is a good deal more gregarious, dining out with girlfriends, attending plays and concerts at the Kennedy Center, making the occasional getaway to New York. But she keeps her own counsel, and whatever she does—or doesn’t—tell her husband remains almost entirely a matter of conjecture. On the day after last fall’s Republican midterm-election defeat, while the president was holding a glum news conference at the White House, Laura Bush was celebrating her 60th birthday with 25 friends at a lunch at the elegant Inn at Little Washington, in the Virginia countryside. “One of the things that has been a failure of this presidency is a lack of a social presidency,’” Matthew Dowd says. “To me, it’s one of the greatest advantages a president can have, building relationships with the opposite party, not at the time when you need their votes but in the course of everyday life, inviting people out to have dinner at Camp David, having them over to the White House.

There’s basically been none of that. We wear it as a badge of honor that we don’t have state dinners. We think it’s a good thing [that] when we go into a country, we go in there as quickly as possible. A lot of people around him think that’s neat. He stayed on schedule; he was only here an hour and a half.’ When we’ve needed allies, at home and abroad, we haven’t had them.” Bunkers, by their nature, reinforce the tics, the traits, the tendencies of their occupants. Bush’s bunker has reinforced his certitude, his self-confidence, his eerie calm, his conviction that his course is right. A few months ago a visitor inquired sympathetically about the burdens of office, and Bush would have none of it: “It’s the best job in the world,” he said. Under the circumstances, the effect is to make Bush look … well, odd. Peggy Noonan, the former speechwriter who found for the president’s father some of the most effective words he ever uttered, and who has generally been a loyal supporter of the son, recently wrote that she saw Bush’s relentless cheeriness in the face of bad news as “disorienting, and strange.”

It is a staple of bunker tales: The bizarrely optimistic leader, eyes glassy with resolve. The decider. The deluder in chief. Over the last year Josh Bolten and Dan Bartlett have gone out of their way to help Bush understand and overcome the apparent disconnect. At military bases around the country, and in hotel function rooms, and occasionally in the Oval Office, he meets privately with families of troops killed in Iraq, even some who are bitterly critical of him to his face, aides say. Bolten, Bartlett, and others have invited writers and historians, by no means all of them Bush supporters, to stop in for lunch or informal discussions.

These visitors tend to come away with an impression similar to Peggy Noonan’s. The historian Alistair Horne told the BBC after an hour-long meeting with the president, “He looked like he’d come off a cruise in the Caribbean and seemed to have none of the worries” one might have anticipated. Irwin Stelzer, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Washington, and a writer for the conservative Weekly Standard, was part of a small group invited to lunch with Bush last spring. He was struck, he told me, by “the kind of calm confidence that the president exhibited. I expected to see somebody under severe pressure. None of that is going on. This is a guy who’s made his decisions. He seems comfortable in them. I or someone else asked him, How are you reacting to the pressure?’ and he said, I just don’t feel any.’ He said, for instance, that God tells us there’s good and evil, but can’t tell me to put troops in Iraq; that’s for me to figure out within the context of good and evil.’ I don’t think he has any doubt in his mind that he’s made the right choice. On the other hand, he has at least enough doubts that he wants to hear other views.”

A recent White House dinner guest, not a political supporter of the president’s, recalled that Bush seemed to take particular comfort from Lincoln’s situation in the summer of 1864, before General William Tecumseh Sherman had taken Atlanta, when some fellow Republicans were warning that Lincoln could never be re-elected if he did not abandon his insistence on emancipation. Historians might well debate the appropriateness of the analogy, but the power of such examples seems palpable for Bush. In a telephone conversation last summer, a few weeks after he left the White House, Dan Bartlett told me that “the grossest misimpression” about Bush is that he doesn’t understand the depth of opposition to his policies and the intensity of public feeling on the war, and that he is somehow unwilling to hear bad news. “The irony is, for the most part that’s all he gets,” Bartlett says. “From the start of the day to the end of the day, it’s 80-20. When things get to the president, it’s usually because it’s bad news. He gets a morning report that’s on his desk every morning with casualty reports. And another in the middle of the day. And another before he goes to bed.

The notion that everybody tiptoes around the crux of issues or controversies is patently false.” What Bush chooses to say publicly, or even privately, is another matter entirely. “My sense is that if he expressed public doubt it would crumble like a house of cards, what public support he has left,” Bartlett says. “What kind of message is that? In his mind, he’s just one of those people who, once he makes his mind up, he’s not going to be one who’s second-guessing himself.” Another former senior Bush aide made the same point this way: “I don’t ever get a panicked call from anybody in the White House. They don’t call and say, Oh, my God, I need a reality check.’ I think they have an extraordinary awareness of how troubled some people are by their decisions, but they work for the one person who’s got his eye on how history will judge him.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian who began her writing career helping Lyndon Johnson with his memoirs and went on to write in-depth accounts of the wartime presidencies of Abraham Lincoln and F.D.R., has seen this trait firsthand. In Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, she wrote that the lower Johnson’s popularity fell, the more he proclaimed confidence in the rightness of his decisions on Vietnam. “He had committed everything he had to Vietnam,” she writes. “Regardless of all evidence, he simply had to be right. To think otherwise, to entertain even the slightest doubt, was to open himself to the pain of reliving old decisions, options and possibilities long since discarded. No, no, no!’ Johnson shouted at me one afternoon as I tried to discuss earlier opportunities for peace. I will not let you take me backward in time on Vietnam. Fifty thousand American boys are dead. Nothing we say can change that fact. Your idea that I could have chosen otherwise rests upon complete ignorance. For if I had chosen otherwise, I would have been responsible for starting World War III.’” Dowd observes that when presidents adopt such thinking they really get in trouble. “To me, it feels a lot like what they call in business the fallacy of sunk costs.’ You’ve spent 75 or 80 percent of your money and you realize you’ve put the building in the wrong place. So you end up putting 20 percent more into a failure because you’re afraid to say you misspent the 80 percent.” He adds: “I know from the president and Karl that they view an admission of a mistake as a sign of weakness. Interestingly enough, the American public views that as a sign of strength. People ask me what advice I’d give a politician. I say I’d have them make a mistake every week and apologize.”

The aide to both Bushes who described the current president’s lack of curiosity said that it extends to the most important single act of his presidency, the decision to go to war in Iraq. “I don’t think we will ever, ever really have George Bush level and say why he did this,” the aide says. “I think he has drunk his Kool-Aid and that’s all there is to it.” The Last Battle What it all comes down to,” a president once said, “is the man at the desk.” The words are those of the first President Bush, who memorably declared in his 1988 campaign, “I am that man.” His son won the second term that the father was denied, and seemed guaranteed to have a consequential presidency, one that would count in the history books. It will count in the history books, all right. So on that January morning 15 months from now, when he sits down to compose his thoughts, what will George W. Bush, the youthful failure who succeeded beyond his family’s wildest imaginings, only to fail again, say to his successor? Will he write of the burdens of the job? Will he offer guidance about the pitfalls? Will he make a joke? Will he praise the virtues of perseverance? After all, the Resolute itself was stuck in the Arctic ice for two full winters, until finally drifting free.

On the surface, Bush remains as confident, as cocky, as ever. At the White House press Christmas party last year, my wife, Dee Dee Myers, a former Clinton White House press secretary, to whom Bush has been unfailingly gracious over the years, shook his hand and asked how he was. “I like a challenge!” he replied, his face crinkling into a grin. Photographs of the president may tell a different story: all the compulsive exercise in the world, all the discipline, all the public projection of confidence and bonhomie, cannot keep him from looking gray and tired and haggard—and, at last, every second of his 61 years. Even so, he is not an old man. If the actuarial tables hold true, it will be his lot to see his legacy bitterly debated for many years. He professes to be at peace with the prospect. “I guess I’m like any other political figure,” he said during a rambling news conference last July, after being asked by Edwin Chen of Bloomberg News how he could hope to prosecute the war in Iraq without public support. “Everybody wants to be loved. Just sometimes the decisions you make, and the consequences, don’t enable you to be loved. And so when it’s all said and done, Ed, if you ever come down to visit the old, tired me down there in Crawford, I will be able to say I looked in the mirror and made decisions based upon principle, not based upon politics. And that’s important to me.”

Never mind, for the moment, that Bush’s administration has been as political as any other. By some measures it has been the most politically motivated presidency of modern times, with policy on issues from science to taxes dictated by considerations of partisan advantage and ideological dogma. Bush’s comment is interesting for what it says about his self-image and about how he parses his own fate. This is another staple of mythic bunker tales: the fearless leader, abandoned by the multitudes, facing the end with a remnant of his loyal band. Like a character in one of the “Left Behind” novels, Bush is waiting for the Rapture, confident that he will be saved, validated, the unpleasant earthly realities of the moment be damned. Delayed vindication may even be more satisfying, something to relish.

A few months ago, when a very senior Reagan-administration official sought to counsel Bush that it was not too late to retool his presidency, reminding him that Ronald Reagan recovered from the disaster of Iran-contra to reach a 68 percent job-approval rating on his last day in office, Bush cut the official off: No, he insisted, Reagan’s ratings rebounded only later, after he had left office. The official happened to be absolutely correct, but no amount of argument could dislodge Bush from his view. His eyes were on his presidential afterlife. Ken Adelman, the Reagan-era arms-control negotiator and longtime hawk, whose distress at Bush’s mishandling of the Iraq war is so intense that it has poisoned his once close friendship with Dick Cheney, is a Shakespeare buff who makes good money by lecturing on what Shakespeare can teach modern managers. I asked him if Bush reminds him of any character in Shakespeare. “Richard II,” he answered instantly, explaining that Richard was surrounded by sycophantic advisers—Bushy, Bagot, and Green—and that he alienated his people with a wasteful war against Ireland, and lost his throne to Henry IV. “Not all the water in the rough, rude sea can wash the balm off from an anointed king,” Richard proclaims in defiance at one point, sounding very much like the Decider we know so well. “The breath of worldly men cannot depose the deputy elected by the Lord.” But a few short passages later, Richard is reduced to acknowledging, “You have but mistook me all this while: I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief, need friends—subjected thus, How can you say to me, I am a king?”

Every president, every person—even one as hunkered and blinkered and bunkered as George Bush—feels want, tastes grief, needs friends. Bush is hardly immune to emotion. Like all the men in his family, he is known to cry easily, if not comfortably or publicly. He has built the political and emotional prison of his bunker, policy by policy and partisan stone by partisan stone. Like all presidents, he alone holds the key. Don’t count on him to turn it on January 20, 2009, when he puts down his burdens and picks up his pen.